The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad documents the collapse of the Myth into a thousand pieces (David Remnick's The Bridge admits to much of the same defenestration of a New Deal charter into the Potomac, where it floated past the Pentagon to hearty cheers). Tariq indicts Obama for hypocrisy and a failure of nerve, whether in dealing with the banking crisis or the escalation in Afghanistan. The charge sheet is comprehensive, but of course not exhaustive ...

In his Rolling Stone article, "The Case for Obama," Tim Dickinson declares that the many indictments of Obama are selective and "grossly distort the sweep of the 44th presidency"—a presidency Dickinson hails as "truly historic." How an administration that represents in essence a continuation of the policies of those that preceded it can be hailed as such is baffling. Thankfully Dickinson acknowledges some examples of seeing the wood for the trees, taking care to include an early mention of The Nation and Tariq Ali's The Obama Syndrome:

Eric Alterman of The Nation distilled the left's lament this summer, arguing that Obama may have "fooled gullible progressives into believing he was a left-liberal partisan, when in fact he is much closer to a conservative corporate shill." The cover of The Obama Syndrome, a new jeremiad by the political commentator Tariq Ali, even gives the progressive resentment a lurid illustration: Obama's face is shown flaking away like a cheap plaster mask to reveal the chuckling visage of George W. Bush.

In a piece for Huffington Post on why exactly one should vote Democrat ("it all comes down to an undeniable fact: that the [Republican] alternative is even worse") Andrew Levine directs readers to Tariq Ali's The Obama Syndrome for a "comprehensive account" of just how awful "Clinton-Pelosi-Obama awful" is.

On September 20th, Tariq Ali was joined at New York's Brecht Forum by John R. MacArthur (President and Publisher of Harper's and author of You Can't Be President) and Frances Fox Piven (Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of Keeping Down the Black Vote) for an event to launch The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad—itself a kind of midterm report on the (failures of the) Obama administration to date. The event aired on C-SPAN's Book TV on October 10th and can now be viewed online by visiting the C-SPAN archives.

In his article for Counterpunch, oh-so-aptly titled "Red Hot France; Tepid Britian," Tariq Ali praises the French for taking to the streets in protest again Sarkozy's pension reforms while lamenting the British aversion to organized mass demonstration in the face of the harshest cuts in 60 years—set to hit the poorest hardest.

The French—students and workers, men and women, citizens all—are out on the streets again. A rise in the pension age? Impossible. The barricades are up, oil supplies running out, trains and planes on a skeleton schedule and the protests are still escalating. More than three million people a week ago. Hundreds of thousands out this week, a million yesterday, and more expected this weekend. And what a joyous sight: school students marching in defense of old people's rights. Were there a Michelin Great Protest guide, France would still be top with three stars, with Greece a close second with two stars.

What a contrast with the miserable, measly actions being planned by the lily-livered English trade unions. There is growing anger and bitterness here too, but it is being recuperated by a petrified bureaucracy. A ritual protest has been planned, largely to demonstrate that they are doing something. But is this something better than nothing?